Chapter 19

Search Engine Optimization SEO and Search Engine Marketing SEM are techniques by which you optimize your web pages, photos, blogs, social media profiles, and even videos to maximize search engine rankings. Both of these techniques refer to your web site’s ability to be recognized by the major search engine.

Popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Bing, and Ask have three components. The first is a huge database that contains every word from every page from every web site in the world. This database can be searched and matched very quickly against any words that you enter into a search engine. The second component of a search engine is its spiders or robots which represent automated computer programs that go out and find a web site, and crawl from page to page cataloging each page’s content. The third part of the process is your typical search interface, which is what you see when you go to Google or Yahoo when you see results.

The most important thing that a search engine has to examine is the use of keywords. These are words that best describes the content on your web page. Without the use of correct keywords, potential customers might be misdirected in the search of your product or service. These keywords derive from the content you have on your web page. The content of each of your web pages is critical. Evaluating that content and the most appropriate words to describe it are an important part of SEO. Also important to have the proper keyword terms with the URL, for search engines put a lot of emphasis on the URL

Content freshness is essential to web page success. When you think about many company’s web pages, you think about how the content on the web page hasn’t changed for year. Updated web pages are the pages that are going to attract returning customers. The search engine assumes the fresher the content, the more relevant the page will be.

I know I use Google five or more times a day. I use it so much I now use Google as a verb.."I just Googled it!" Search engines are a neccessity to my day-to-day Internet browsing life. Questions that are brought up throughout the day, sites I want to find, random topics, I all need to Google. With my daily search engine use and this chapter, I learned the absolute importance of keywords. I wouldn't find what I'm looking for five times a day without the correct use of keywords to direct me to the right placeA company should want to update their information on their web page to be one of the first results on a search engine, but also to update their current customers on changes and additions to their company. You have the tools to create returning customers, use it! SEO is all about having a presence on the Web. It’s about being found exactly when your customers are looking for your company.